News

Salzburg Festival running deficit despite bumper sales

The future of the Salzburg Festival has been called into question following claims by its president Helga Rabl-Stadler that it needs a substantial increase in state funding if it is to survive.

Speaking to the Salzburger Nachrichten newspaper, Rabl-Stadler said ‘I cannot stay silent any longer… We need substantially more funding. What is at stake here is the future of the Salzburg Festival’.

Her comments follow the announcement of a €1.6m (£1.3m) loss from the 2013 season despite it selling a record number of tickets and achieving historically high levels of sponsorship.

Last year’s programme saw 280 performances of opera, concerts and plays over 45 days in 14 venues around the city of Mozart’s birth. More than 286,000 tickets were sold during the season ‒ 93% of capacity ‒ generating revenue of €29.1m (£23.9m), equivalent to 46% of all income.

More than €12m (£9.8m) was raised through sponsorship. Taken together with €2.7m (£2.2m) contributed by the festival’s Association of Friends, 2013 marked the first year in the 93-year-old annual event’s history in which private donations were higher than public support.

Public funding of €13.5m (£11m) accounted for 17% to total revenues, with sponsorship generating another 18%. The federal government was the largest single benefactor, contributing €5.4m (£4.4m), with a similar amount pledged by the provincial and city authorities.

Rabl-Stadler warned that one consequence of last year’s deficit would be a substantial reduction in the budget for this year’s festival, which will fall from €65 million (£53.3m) to ‘well below’ €60m (£49.2m). She also warned that the prospect of commissioning fewer new productions made ‘neither economic nor artistic sense’.

Although the 2014 programme is expected to break even, early calculations for 2015 currently suggest the festival is likely to lose €3m (£2.5m).

The call for greater state support highlights the dwindling value of government funding for the festival, which peaked at €13.5m (£11m) in 1998 and has remained at that figure for the past 16 years. Both federal and state authorities have suggested that additional funding is unlikely before 2016.

Recent comments

Geoffrey Baker: 'We need ethically and pedagogically sound music education, not music education in any form'Tricia Tunstall It seems that Mr. Baker and I are at an impasse regarding “authentic scholarship.” His insults to my book include the accusation that it “lacks any discernible grounding in scholarship.” I have never claimed to have written a scholarly work. My book was an honest report on my experiences encountering El Sistema in Venezuela and in the U.S. I have great respect for scholarly work. Changing Lives is reportage, not scholarship. Mr. Baker says his book is scholarship because it includes a host of interviews and citations. However, most of his interviewees remain anonymous, making the research entirely unverifiable. (In my unscholarly book, I do attributes every quote by name.) Further, his citations are all in support of his views; there is no acknowledgment that in fact there are many people, scholarly and otherwise, who hold views opposing his. For these reasons, I cannot consider his work a model of scholarly endeavor. Regarding Mr. Baker’s assertion that my portrayal of Maestro Abreu constitutes hagiography: how seriously can this be taken, from someone who has called Abreu “the Fuhrer”? And as for his plucking out the three words “in any form” in my sentence in support of music education,...Tricia Tunstall - Jan 24, 8:59 PM

Tricia Tunstall: Geoffrey Baker's El Sistema denunciation has the feel of a vendettaTricia Tunstall Geoff Baker has chosen to attack me from a personal angle, beginning with his first, intentionally insulting sentence. I am compelled, therefore, to address his misrepresentations. To be clear: I have never once been paid by El Sistema. And I was a successful independent writer and music educator for three decades before discovering and becoming an enthusiast about El Sistema five years ago. As for “hitching” my career: Are we to understand that Baker’s crusade against El Sistema has nothing to do with building his own career? Further, I have never claimed that I am a scholar or that my books are scholarly. However, I have had a number of years of graduate study in musicology and music education, and I have great respect for the scrupulous attribution-based research and deliberate moderation of tone that characterize fine academic scholarship. I do not see these qualities in great evidence in Baker’s book. On the grounds that Maestro Abreu’s grandparents were Italian immigrants, Baker scorns my claim that Abreu and the eleven other Sistema founders were “native Venezuelans.” I believe that quite a large percentage of Americans, both North and South, would be surprised to hear that having immigrant grandparents...Tricia Tunstall - Dec 16, 5:26 PM

Tricia Tunstall: Geoffrey Baker's El Sistema denunciation has the feel of a vendettaGeoffrey Baker Tricia Tunstall is a professional Sistema advocate who has hitched her career to the program. It’s therefore unsurprising that she doesn’t like a book that reveals the program’s dark underbelly and exposes the vacuity of her own book-length press release, Changing Lives. The article above is just another piece of the PR guff in which she specializes. She is not a scholar, and her incapacity to review an academic book shines through. Yet she has the gall to suggest that my book – published by Oxford University Press, thrice peer-reviewed, and endorsed on the back cover by global authorities on music and education – “hardly constitutes scholarly discourse.” She does not even speak good Spanish, yet claims expertise on Venezuelan music education, and her understanding of Venezuelan society and history is pitiful. A point-by-point rebuttal would be like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, so I will just point out a few examples. She claims that El Sistema sprang “from the mid-1970s anti-colonialist fervour of native Venezuelans” – making founder José Antonio Abreu sound like a Pemón Indian rather than the grandson of Italian immigrants and member of the Venezuelan elite steeped in that class’s Eurocentrism. In...Geoffrey Baker - Dec 13, 1:18 PM